There is a growing research literature on phonetic symbolism in poetry, sometimes with incongruent results.
Through a theoretical structural analysis we show that, (a) individual speech sounds have (sometimes conflicting) potentials to
suggest elementary percepts, such as abruptness, hardness, smoothness; and (b) from these elementary percepts some general
psychological atmosphere may be abstracted that may be individuated in specific emotions as ‘love,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘anger,’ by semantic
feature-addition. This proposal can reconcile incongruous research results. Sound-symbolic lexical entries are governed by similar
principles, but fossilized. Large-scale statistical investigation may reveal significant sound-symbolic effects only when the same
phonemes repeat throughout the poem. They may, however, miss conspicuous local sound effects, revealed only by local analysis.
Some sceptical conclusions in the research literature may be due to this phenomenon. The proposed method may account not only for
statistical correlations, but also for the perception of a pervasive emotional atmosphere in a poem.
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